Being led blindfolded into a large room isn’t the most reassuring experience — especially when that room is as spooky and opulent as the Hilton Cincinnati’s Hall of Mirrors. Taking care not to trip over your feet and then fidgeting with your eye mask while trying to imagine your surroundings are all part of the performance of Rashaad Newsome’s RUNNING: a musical offering from the Contemporary Arts Center’s This Time Tomorrow.
When they’re invited to remove their blindfolds, the audience eagerly unmasks, only to find the same total darkness they’d been sitting in for the past 5 minutes. A looped drum machine rhythm, followed by formless synth chords and droplets of piano fade into the room, filling the space with the sounds of early-aughts R&B — only more sparse and martial.
A red spotlight drops from the ceiling to a robed vocalist positioned jarringly close to the front row, giving the impression that attendees had been transported into the climax of a music video. He steps to the mic, launching into a state of jazzy glossolalia. What sounds like speaking in tongues though, is actually what’s called a “vocal run,” although in this case, the run goes on exponentially farther than usual.
Anyone who’s familiar with Gospel or Soul music has heard a run before. It’s that trail of ahs or ohs or oos that follows a particularly impressive note — a means of flexing one’s vocal prowess while upping a song’s emotional impact. In the case of Newsome’s piece, though, the runs are the song. What is traditionally a flourish becomes an expression of being human.
As the spotlight cycles around the room to RUNNING’s trio of performers (finally shining on all of them in the piece’s final stretch), the audience is given nearly an hour to reflect on the power of the voice to emote, even without words. Each time the mic is baton-passed between Kyron El, Aaron Marcellus and Devin Michael, the nearly unchanging loop is given new meaning.
A cloud of voices, retro-futurist vibes and sound collage, RUNNING is an abstract expression of emotion. The sadness and triumph are intertwined, the fluttering melodies sometimes punctuated by creepily musical sirens or the muffled body cam transmissions from police officers killing black men and women. In the same vein as contemporaries Dean Blunt and James Ferraro, Newsome’s piece deconstructs traditional tropes of R&B to create something vast and transcendental.
In the Hall of Mirrors last night, RUNNING felt like FLOATING, suspended in introspection.
Rashaad Newsome’s RUNNING is part of the Contemporary Art Center’s inaugural This Time Tomorrow festival. For more info visit thistimetmrw.com. For our preview story on the festival, click here.
This article appears in Apr 10-17, 2019.